Gatekeepers

Talent is not enough.

There are gatekeepers of the world, and these gatekeepers define value.

They define value by making sense of the noise, of the cacophony of competing voices.

They implement systems to channel and distribute chosen voices.

They select what is worth seeing and hearing, what is worthy of public attention, of admiration and praise, and they categorize it for the people. They tell people what it is, and what it means.

The values they pick are always self serving. Gatekeepers select voices that reinforce their authority and position the most. This is natural, this is survival.

The systems they implement are often pay to play. They capitalize on the desire to be the voice. You must pay to play.

Sometimes there is a voice that the gatekeepers have overlooked, or ignored. These voices emerge out of revolution, out of defiance. They are non conformist that grow in influence in proportion to their rejection by the gatekeepers.

Eventually an outside gatekeepers sees the fire inside this voice, and builds its own channel and systems around it.

Sometimes it is the voice that builds these systems and channels for itself, and in time becomes a gatekeeper for other voices.
This is how it works, I believe. Roughly.
Any voice:

Actors, musicians, writers, comics, playwrights, dancers, academics, choreographers, artists, etc.

These gatekeepers are necessary. They are byproducts of society need to be lead, to provide a heuristic to aid judgement. The public chooses them to be guardians of public values, to represent what the public desires, what it avers.

But in time these gatekeepers stop serving the public, and start serving themselves. They preserve the status quo.

And a divergence occurs, and this creates opportunity for new voices.

The public is hungry for something different, that it’s not being fed.

You don’t need talent to succeed, you just need to serve the gatekeeper.

If you will not serve, you need talent, as well as resilient defiance, and an ability to endure solitary rejection, and sing with the same vigor, even if to an empty room.